RI: Medium: Collaborative Research: Optimizing Policies for Service Organizations in Complex Structured Domains

本项目使用模拟器和概率行为模型研究一类重要的复杂结构化规划域，称为“服务域”。服务领域的示例包括在典型城市中优化应急响应、在医院中调度医生和护士、在典型办公室中管理任务、从配送中心以最佳方式向商店交付产品。这些领域具有许多共同的特征，如关系结构、并行操作、多时间尺度决策、外生事件以及对人类可解释解决方案的需求，这使得它们具有很高的挑战性。该项目通过多种技术为服务领域开发可扩展的原则性规划算法，包括多时间尺度优化的新颖分层框架、基于新模型的无仿真规划算法和基于一阶决策图的基于模型的规划。通过与俄勒冈州科瓦利斯消防部门的合作，这些技术被应用于优化城市火灾和应急响应的现实问题。项目成果包括解决服务领域问题的新算法和框架、应急响应领域算法的原型实现以及用于研究的新服务领域测试平台。这项工作的更广泛影响包括更具成本效益的应急系统，以及就服务领域的下一代决策支持系统开发新的面向研究的课程、教程和特别讲习班。

This project studies an important class of complex structured planning domains called ``service domains'' using simulators and probabilisticaction models. Examples of service domains include optimizing emergency response in a typical city, scheduling doctors and nurses in a hospital, administering tasks in a typical office, optimally delivering products to shops from distribution centers. These domains share many characteristics such as relational structure, parallel actions, multi-time-scale decision making, exogenous events, and the need for human interpretable solutions that make them highly challenging.The project develops scalable and principled planning algorithms for service domains through a variety of techniques including a novelhierarchical framework of multi-time-scale optimization, newmodel-free simulation-based planning algorithms, and model-based planning via composition of first-order decision diagrams. These techniques are applied to the real-world problem of optimizing the fire and emergency response in cities through a collaborationwith the fire department of Corvallis, Oregon. The results of the project include new algorithms and frameworks to solve service domains, prototype implementations of the algorithmsin the emeregency response domain, and new testbeds of service domains for research. The broader impact of the work includes more cost-effective emergency response systems, and development of new research-oriented courses, tutorials and special workshops on the next generation decision support systems for service domains.